FREMONT PLACE Historic Los Angeles

"For the Man of Means"

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WILSHIRE BOULEVARD ADAMS BOULEVARD BERKELEY SQUARE
WINDSOR SQUARE WESTMORELAND PLACE

The suburban development of Los Angeles began in earnest around 1890. That year, residential Fort Street south of the Plaza in today's resurgent Downtown was renamed Broadway; its tall, narrow Victorian houses were either demolished for much taller masonry commercial buildings such as the Bradbury at Third Street or—in a practice that would be common in Los Angeles for the next 35 years—picked up and moved to new neighborhoods. While the initial push of suburbanization was to the southwest along the Figueroa Street corridor, a rival sweep of housing tract after housing tract was forming more due west of the original directional "ground zero" of Los Angeles at First and Main. The district today designated Pico-Union, for instance, saw new houses built, most often in lingering Victorian styles, among which those few of the 1880s built on Fort Street and trucked west barely stood out. Then, in 1895, Gaylord Wilshire spurred the expansion of Westlake with his famous exclusive and restriction-bound boulevard beginning on the far side of that district's namesake park, too far out to succeed, many opined. Over the next three decades, the maturing West Adams district, two miles down Figueroa and marked by an expensive establishment air amid lush vegetation, would thrive until its houses became old and its lots worth more by subdividing them during the city's wild population boom in the '20s as ever-newer suburbs began to draw the rich toward ever-extending Wilshire Boulevard—the pendulum had definitively swung northwest. By then, a dizzying number of neighborhoods were vying for the rich reconsidering West Adams. There was the westward expansion of West Adams itself, including gated Berkeley Square and the even newer Lafayette Square; there was far-flung Beverly Hills and even farther-flung Bel-Air and Brentwood; to the north, Los Feliz was also in the running. And, of course, there was always the singular allure of Pasadena.

A composite of plates from the Baist real estate atlas compiled shortly after the 1911 opening
of Fremont Place and before the first house was built: The road at left—at the south end of
the tract—is today Olympic Boulevard; the early designations of the two central drives
were dropped in the '20s. The seven lots fronting Wilshire were mostly given
addresses on that boulevard; altogether, given the competitive market
for the housing dollars of the affluent of Los Angeles, many more
houses than original lots were built by the early '30s. The
initial hype of "in-town estates" would devolve into
more of a conventional suburban tract.

Developing in what by 1920 was being termed the "West End" of Los Angeles—as had Pico-Union and Westlake been called before—were three basic subdivisions hugging Wilshire Boulevard west of Norton Avenue. The first phase of Windsor Square—a distinct development too often today lumped with Hancock Park, which came a decade later—began to be advertised in 1911. So too that year did Fremont Place open for sales. As if the citywide competition for the title of "most exclusive" neighborhood was not stiff enough, there was a similar race among those Wilshire-adjacent developments between Norton and Highland avenues. The phases of Windsor Square were largely platted in a rectilinear fashion, more along the familiar lines of older parts of Los Angeles, including West Adams. The plan of Hancock Park included Beverly Hills–like curving streets. Neither of these subdivisions north of Wilshire, however, included pretentious gates, although such grand devices had helped Berkeley Square, for example, hang on to exclusivity longer than other parts of West Adams. When developers Charles Ingram and David Barry acquired 51 acres south of the boulevard for their ambitious tract, they saw the need to draw the attention of those motoring west out only-just-macadamed Wilshire to the left rather than to the right once they crossed Norton Avenue.

The long road running at the top of the images here is Wilshire Boulevard,
south of which Fremont Place lies at center of aerials taken in 1918 (above) and
1922. As pressure on housing mounted with the enormous influx of new Angelenos
after the world war, property owners in West Adams sought to sell aging Victorian and
early-20th-century houses at considerable profit and move from the old district to shiny
new ones. Even by 1922, only about 20 houses sit in barren landscape along Fremont Place's
main avenues, originally designated Easterly and Westerly drives and dotted by recent plantings. Between the drives are short cross roadways not yet connected to West Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth streets (and to which they would never actually be open to allow traffic through the Place). The
new Los Angeles High School, recently opened in 1917 (at far left above and at bottom edge

below) is in place on Country Club Drive—later renamed when it became part of the route

of Olympic Boulevard—the southern border of Fremont Place. The light line running

north from the Wilshire–Westerly Drive gate in both images is Rossmore Avenue,

which divides the grid of Windsor Square from what was just developing into

the now-well-known real estate rival tract called Hancock Park to its west.

The Ingram-Barry tract would be christened Fremont Place, the name evoking heroic old California days to overlay its modern design of Beverly Hills–style street curves with a sort of upright establishment cred. It seems that the marketing team of Ingram and Barry might have somehow already sensed a preference among affluent homeseekers of having a kind of barrier—Wilshire Boulevard in this case—between them and imperceptibly less salubrious lands to the south. Gates would lend distinction to Fremont Place and suggest protection, exclusivity, and loftiness to those who weren't content with perpendicularity and wide-open spaces. Stately colonnaded portals—no arches or actual operating gates—rose at the Place's two boulevard entrances before a single lot had been sold, with two less elaborate designs marking the southerly ends of the main roadways. The east boundary of the subdivision was a half-block west of Burck Place, subsequently renamed as an extension of Lucerne Boulevard; the west line was a half-block east of Muirfield Road. The two main drags were Easterly Drive and Westerly Drive, designations that faded in the '20s in favor of "Fremont Place" and "Fremont Place West." With Wilshire its northern boundary, at the south was Country Club Drive, leading directly from the Country Club District—another glamorous, but ultimately largely unsuccessful, contender for rich homeseekers. Country Club Drive was later brought into alignment with Olympic Boulevard, where the third and fourth gates of Fremont Place remain today, closed to traffic and the dropoff in neighborhood desirability the south.

This lower altitude view from more or less than same perspective as the broader bird's-eye above was
taken 50 years later; numbers 53, 55, and 61 Fremont Place appear at the lower edge from right.

In the fall of 1911, display ads began to appear in the Los Angeles Times offering "The most exclusive and highest class residence community in the most desirable residential city in America—Fremont Place." Ingram and Barry gushed further: "There is no other residence property in Los Angeles to compare with it—no property which gives the man of means such opportunity for exclusiveness—such unique home attractions." Then came the real sales pitch: "Considering its character, its elegance—the prices at which this property is obtainable are exceedingly low. Because of its extremely high character—the property is necessarily limited—and those who wish to secure a homesite here must avail themselves of the opportunity at once." There would, in fact, be quite a bit of interest but no mad rush of "men of means"; it would be nearly three years before the first house was built. Particulars included the tract's division into "48 large roomy lots, with broad, petrolithic pavement, 22-foot parkings, 7-foot sidewalks—beautiful ornamental trees." With the entire "West End" actually little more than prairie, it would be a while before the trees provided any shade or beauty. It is surprising, when one thinks about it, how many men of means and their families were willing to put up with little natural vegetation and only sparse settlement for as long as they did. It wasn't until the late '20s that Windsor Square, Hancock Park, and Fremont Place would even begin to have the lush Garden District–like charm that many would be leaving behind in old West Adams. But then, whether you were rich or poor, Los Angeles was all about the new.

NOTE: Fremont Place: A Historical Inventory is a work in progress; the links below under illustrations of each address lead to house histories in various stages of completion.

A large advertisement for Fremont Place appeared in
the Los Angeles Times on October 8, 1911; on the same day, a
rendering of its main gates designed by architect J. Martyn Haenke, depicted
below in their original configuration and patterned after those of Berkeley Square,
which David Barry saw every day from his Gramercy Place house, also appeared. While
described by promoters as granite, the gates were actually of cast concrete treated
to resemble the more luxurious material. Two more portals stood along Country
Country Club Drive (a stretch of road now aligned with Olympic Boulevard)
at the south end of the tract. All four gates remain, less their
sweeping colonnades incorporating pedestrian entrances.

The west gate as seen from inside Fremont Place on April 21, 1956: The connecting colonnades
that formed the pedestrian entrances are gone by now, thought by some to have been
removed after the destabilizing effects of the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.
At right is the fabled Barnett house at 644 South Rossmore Avenue.

The west Fremont Place gates depicted in 2016; the bases of the
pedestrian entrances seem rather forlorn despite urns added after the
removal of the columns. (Urns do not appear on the corresponding bases
of the east gate.) In July 2018, the driver of a taxi of the Beverly Hills Cab
Company lost control, running through the fence and into the leftmost
base seen here; the modular blocks cast in 1911 and in place since
were expertly reassembled by stonemasons in early September.

THE INVENTORY

21 Fremont Place: The Morris Harris House
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Photo:

31 Fremont Place: The Solomon and Amy Hellman Aronson House

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